Nikita Gill grew up between two worlds — a sailor father, a teacher mother, and an unusual childhood that included extended periods at sea. The porthole image is not incidental: a four-year-old with The Tale of Peter Rabbit on a moving ship is already a child for whom books provide the stable ground the literal ground cannot. That formation shows up clearly in what she returns to: works that hold still when everything else moves. The books that shaped her teenage years are specifically South Asian and specifically political. Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice-Candy Man — which she read at 15 — is a Partition novel told through a child's eyes, and Gill identifies it precisely: it taught her that fiction could carry history. That is not a small lesson. It's the central argument for the literary novel over the history book, and she absorbed it young enough for it to become structural. Arundhati Roy does double duty here — as a novelist and as a model of writerly conduct. Gill's framing is deliberate: 'Her advocacy is as courageous as her writing.' This is a writer who thinks the job includes caring about the world, not just rendering it beautifully. Roy and The God of Small Things arrived at 16; the nonfiction followed. That's a coherent value system assembled before adulthood. The Palace of Illusions is the book that made her want to write, and her description of how she encountered it is worth noting: she read it three times to figure out precisely how it worked. That's not a reader — that's a writer reverse-engineering a mechanism. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's retelling of Draupadi from the Mahabharata gave her the template: myth told from the inside, in a woman's own words. The book Gill herself published — Styx — is the downstream consequence of that encounter. The Flowers in the Attic admission is the most honest moment in the piece. VC Andrews' Gothic family horror is genuinely not suitable for young readers, and Gill doesn't perform regret or amusement — she says plainly someone should have tried to stop her, while acknowledging she was stubborn enough that it wouldn't have worked. That balance of self-knowledge and mild horror is exactly the register the piece earns. Lucille Clifton, discovered later, is the most significant literary influence she names for her actual practice. 'Complex brevity and the powerful nature of poetry' — that's a craft lesson, not a biographical one. Clifton's work is densely compressed, historically grounded, and formally unshowy; if you read Gill's poetry knowing she came to Clifton as an adult, the inheritance is legible. The current read — Florence Knapp's The Names — and the comfort read — Nikesh Shukla's Brown Baby — bookend a life shaped by writers who use personal and historical specificity to reach something larger. The pattern holds from Potter to Clifton: Gill reads for groundedness, not escapism, even when the books are fantastical.
